Hamlet of the Shchigrovsky District by Ivan Turgenev

First published: "Gamlet Shchigrovskogo uezda," 1849 (English translation, 1855)

Type of plot: Sketch

Time of work: The 1840's

Locale: A backwater village in the Shchigrovsky District of Russia

Principal Characters:

• The sportsman, the narrator and assumed voice of the writer, a traveling hunter
• Vasily Vasilych, the main character, an embittered, poor landowner
• Pyotr Petrovich Lupikhin, the sharp-tongued village wit

The Story

The first-person narrator begins this story by establishing a frank and straightforward camaraderie with his audience. A well-mannered, cultured, and polite man, the narrator informs his readers that he had, on one of his hunting trips, been invited to a dinner party that was given by one Alexander Mikhailych. The host's surname is unimportant. A minor character, he is a representative of his class: a small-minded, provincial landowner who nearly starves his guests because he must wait for the arrival of an important dignitary.

Using the party as a vehicle to satirize provincial aristocracy, the narrator gives a blow-by-blow account of the evening's festivities: when he arrived, how he was greeted, who was there and what was said. He minutely details how he watched the provincials playing cards, their stomachs drooping over the tables; how he nearly fell asleep; and how he was first whisked away by Voinitsyn, a college failure, and then by Pyotr Lupikhin, the local satirist. This traveling hunter is far too reserved and polished to direct more than a subtle, pointed attack on what he witnessed. In this story he uses first Lupikhin and then Vasily Vasilych as mouthpieces for broad, virulent satire.

Lupikhin mocks the pageant of landowners who parade in front of him: They are a fat, ignorant lot, and Lupikhin sees them as so many animals. One is said to be "as stupid as a couple of merchants' horses"; another is described as a sly predator, "stealing along by the wall, glancing all around him like a veritable wolf."

While pleading disgust and claiming that it is hardly necessary for him to describe such a dinner, the narrator, humorously enough, describes it anyway. He captures snapshots of hypocritical stances: The boorish landowners, attempting to appear sophisticated, wear French manners as one wears a tight girdle. The tardy dignitary graces his fellow guests with a high-sounding after-dinner speech; this high official's remarks are as fatuous as the philosophizing of William Shakespeare's Polonius.

The party described, the narrator slowly moves toward the core of his story. Something happened that evening, he tells his readers, that made the party worth mentioning: He met "a certain remarkable person." This is where the story-within-a-story begins. In a thoroughly unappealing room, the narrator meets one Vasily Vasilych. The latter, seeing that the narrator cannot sleep just as he cannot, begins a long dramatic monologue on the story of his life: the circumstances of his birth, his mama's efforts to educate her boy of the steppes, and his foolish boyhood. What Vasily Vasilych reiterates, in this confessional tirade, is his awareness of his mediocrity. He knows that, like everyone else, he lacks originality. He differs from those pretentious party guests only in that he knows that he is common; he suffers, Vasily Vasilych tells the narrator (and the narrator retells his readers) because he is sensitive to his condition.

Who knows what one will say in the middle of the night, in a strange house, to a bedfellow who is a complete stranger whom one will never see again? The narrator, merely acting as a drum on which Vasily Vasilych beats, documents a moment in time. It is a moment in which he is placed in a situation wherein he hears the most pitiful of stories from a man who really is not remarkable. Really, the narrator implies, Vasily Vasilych is a man of his time, a man of his place, a representative of his generation.

Vasily Vasilych recounts how he came to be fully repulsed by his very being. One day he was accosted by a local inspector for not repairing his bridge. A conversation ensued, in which the poor landowner derided a certain party who was running for office. The inspector chided Vasily Vasilych, saying that persons of no consequence such as the two of them have no business passing judgment on the higher-ups. Vasily Vasilych, a man who is consumed by self-hatred and an abject sense of smallness, relates how he retreated into his room, scrutinized his face in the mirror, then, slowly, stuck out his tongue at his own reflection.

Interrupted by a sleepy, irritated neighbor, the main character sheepishly hides beneath the bedding. When the narrator presses him at least to state his full name, he alludes to another self-absorbed man, a man who is fated to live and die in a rotten world: the prince in Shakespeare's Hamlet, Prince of Denmark (c. 1600-1601): "But if you earnestly want to give me some kind of title, then call me . . . call me Hamlet of the Shchigrovsky District. There are many such Hamlets in every district."